Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Moments of Truth
- 2 Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa
- 3 Apprehending Pristine Experience
- 4 Everyday Experience
- 5 Moments Are Essential
- 6 Experience in Tourette's Syndrome
- 7 The Moment (Not): Happy and Sad
- 8 Subjunctification
- 9 Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age
- 10 Iteration Is Essential
- 11 Epistemological Q/A
- 12 A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject
- 13 Pristine Experience (Not): Emotion and Schizophrenia
- 14 Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician
- 15 Unsymbolized Thinking
- 16 Sensory Awareness
- 17 The Radical Non-subjectivity of Pristine Experience
- 18 Diamonds versus Glass
- 19 Into the Floor: A Right-or-Wrong-Answer Natural Experiment
- 20 The Emergence of Salient Characteristics
- 21 Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
- Appendix: List of Constraints
- References
- Index
10 - Iteration Is Essential
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Moments of Truth
- 2 Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa
- 3 Apprehending Pristine Experience
- 4 Everyday Experience
- 5 Moments Are Essential
- 6 Experience in Tourette's Syndrome
- 7 The Moment (Not): Happy and Sad
- 8 Subjunctification
- 9 Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age
- 10 Iteration Is Essential
- 11 Epistemological Q/A
- 12 A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject
- 13 Pristine Experience (Not): Emotion and Schizophrenia
- 14 Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician
- 15 Unsymbolized Thinking
- 16 Sensory Awareness
- 17 The Radical Non-subjectivity of Pristine Experience
- 18 Diamonds versus Glass
- 19 Into the Floor: A Right-or-Wrong-Answer Natural Experiment
- 20 The Emergence of Salient Characteristics
- 21 Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
- Appendix: List of Constraints
- References
- Index
Summary
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
– Francis BaconIn Chapter 5, we noticed this constraint: The exploration of pristine experience has to be iterative. As we turn the screw ever more securely into the notion of faithfully apprehending experience, it's time to return to that constraint, which I think is of fundamental but largely overlooked importance to consciousness science. We could not have discovered the fragmented multiplicity of bulimia (Chapter 2) without an iterative method; we could not have made the slow-forming images or black-and-white images speculations (Chapter 9) without an iterative method. This chapter explains why.
I use iterative in the same way a mathematician uses it: a series of successive approximations leading to a satisfactorily close approximate solution. Suppose a mathematician uses an iterative method to determine the value of x when f(x) = F. She guesses an initial value x1 and determines f(x1). If f(x1) is satisfactorily close to F, then she's done: x1 is the desired solution. Otherwise, she uses this new information (f(x1)) to make a second (better) guess x2 and then determines f(x2). If f(x2) is satisfactorily close to F, then she's done: x2 is the desired solution. Otherwise she uses this new information (f(x2)) to make a third (even better) guess x3.
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- Information
- Investigating Pristine Inner ExperienceMoments of Truth, pp. 152 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011